|
Deteriorata posted:It wasn't just McGovern's loss. Carter ran as a moderate and barely won in the Watergate aftermath, then Carter and Mondale both lost to Reagan and Dukakis lost to G. H. W. Bush. The country as a whole was embracing conservatism as the Dixiecrats had abandoned the Democratic party over civil rights. The path to an electoral majority largely disappeared for an overtly liberal agenda. The Democrats' abandonment of liberalism wasn't the cause, it was the effect of the country generally moving to the right in the '80s. the democratic decision to let unions and welfare rot on the vine on the grounds that hey, we'll have the House forever, what could we possibly have to lose was certainly A Decision, tho sure is a good thing that didn't have any outcomes
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2019 23:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 10:36 |
|
|
Durandal1707 posted:I've always had this inkling that McGovern got hosed pretty badly by history. From what i've understood from cursory reading over the years, he did a lot of good trying to curb hungry and inequality with his work in the senate, among other things. But he ended up losing so badly that the Dems abandoned the left and slid further toward the center in its aftermath. (I think Fritz's posting on Clinton posits that Third Way ideology came about because of that) At least, that's my admittedly very limited understanding of things. Nixon led the way in the political re-alignment of the US with all its ripple effect consequences, and he was obsessed with his loss to Kennedy in '60. His personality 'traits' of raging paranoia and obsession over sometimes the most ridiculous of minute details helped (at least in part) to craft a modern for the time campaign system. Plus, you know, the paranoia over others cheating always made him cheat, and this aspect of his thinking only magnified in the White House years because he was so determined he'd be ousted. (You can argue that part of his fear of this was the somewhat delusional idea that this would in fact doom America, because Nixon was mostly obsessed with his ideas for a new US foreign policy) The re-alignment tearing the Democratic machineries apart while this was happening really didn't give McGovern (or anyone else on the radar) good chances no matter how you look at it. Tricky Dick was a very confused personality, and it's interesting how that both hindered and helped him at different times. Fritz is about to get to the good parts (worse parts?), too. I'm not sure what kind of a response from the left would've been effective against the sheer cynical brutality post-1960 Nixon adopted.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2019 15:46
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Tricky Dick was a very confused personality, and it's interesting how that both hindered and helped him at different times. Fritz is about to get to the good parts (worse parts?), too. I'm not sure what kind of a response from the left would've been effective against the sheer cynical brutality post-1960 Nixon adopted. The Nixon administration should have been subject to something equivalent to the Nuremberg trials, ending with the whole lot of them hanged.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2019 18:45
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:The Nixon administration should have been subject to something equivalent to the Nuremberg trials, ending with the whole lot of them hanged. One of the most important functions of the political class is to ensure that nobody from the political class ever faces any real consequences for their actions. It's implicitly part of the bargain of getting to be part of the political class.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2019 18:51
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:The Nixon administration should have been subject to something equivalent to the Nuremberg trials, ending with the whole lot of them hanged. And yet a would-be president made a deal about her close personal ties to Henry. We know how this goes.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2019 19:46
|
|
|
pseudanonymous posted:One of the most important functions of the political class is to ensure that nobody from the political class ever faces any real consequences for their actions. It's implicitly part of the bargain of getting to be part of the political class. Yeah, there exists an is-ought gap which I propose closing with a very sharp rapidly falling blade.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2019 10:56
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Yeah, there exists an is-ought gap which I propose closing with a very sharp rapidly falling blade. The Order of the day is Terror!
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2019 14:26
|
|
|
In case people are interested, here's an Atlantic article regarding "The Emerging Republican Majority", the Southern Strategy, and the Nixon administration's use of race. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/emerging-republican-majority/595504/
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2019 20:39
|
|
|
And of course if you want to read...well, a version of the 72 campaign there's Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. Hunter did not like Hubert Humphrey or Ed Muskie at all.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2019 00:53
|
|
|
Thank you for giving me what I have always wanted, more Dick!
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2019 22:33
|
|
|
Good evening ignorant pigs! Put down your crack pipes and your beer bongs and pay attention!  It's that time again: the time to decide who my next subject will be, as I've only got one section left to go before we finish off Richard Nixon. Since this one was so long, we're going to try and go a little shorter for the next guy. 1. John Quincy Adams Going back to pre-war America. John Quincy Adams, you'll all recall, is the son of the second President and nearly as big a conceited, vain dick as his father. Elected to the Presidency without either a popular or electoral vote plurality (the House of Representatives chose him), Adams spent four years in purgatory, stymied in every effort by the allies of Andrew Jackson. 2. William McKinley Giant head and all! McKinley is, of course, one of only four Presidents in our history to be assassinated in office--something that really belies just how bland and inoffensive a man he was. Nevertheless, if you choose him, you're going to get the chance to learn a few things I bet you didn't already know. 3. James Monroe Who? Yes, Monroe is the most-forgotten of the Founding Father Presidents, probably because he's only remarkable for how truly unremarkable his Presidency was. The so-called "Era of Good Feelings", however, was anything but. Would you like to know why? 4. George H.W. Bush We talked about why the son is such an irredeemable monster, so why don't we spend some time talking about what a piece of poo poo his father was too? Former Congressman, former CIA Director, and the man who pardoned many of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal, ol' Herbert Walker Bush's failures as a father are, in many ways, the reason for Junior's deficiencies.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 00:16
|
|
|
William McKinley, because reading about a president getting capped would be cathartic.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 00:25
|
|
|
You want a short one? William Henry Harrison! 
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 02:06
|
|
|
William McKinley seems the best choice for a more limited post- death in office means less time to cover!
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 02:13
|
|
|
as much as i want to see a post about the son of six-term president John Adams, William McKinley would probably be educational
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 03:03
|
|
|
McKinley
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 16:00
|
|
|
Read my lips: George Bush
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 17:01
|
|
|
Hypnobeard posted:William McKinley, because reading about a president getting capped would be cathartic. Can't really argue with this.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 17:37
|
|
|
Going to go with James Monroe because he's the one of these four I know legit the least about.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2019 19:52
|
|
|
Bush. After the Nixon posts, I’m up for reading about more despicable modern Republicans.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2019 15:25
|
|
|
James Monroe gave us the Monroe Doctrine and was the last Revolutionary War veteran elected president, and I'm always down to learn about our more obscure presidents.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2019 04:24
|
|
|
Don Gato posted:James Monroe gave us the Monroe Doctrine and was the last Revolutionary War veteran elected president, and I'm always down to learn about our more obscure presidents. (Andrew Jackson was the last Revolutionary War veteran elected President. He was a courier in the North Carolina militia and fought at the Battle of Hanging Rock in 1780, at the age of 13.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2019 05:43
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:(Andrew Jackson was the last Revolutionary War veteran elected President. He was a courier in the North Carolina militia and fought at the Battle of Hanging Rock in 1780, at the age of 13.) GODDAMNIT  , my half remembered anecdote! I blame the history channel, that's probably where I got it from.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2019 07:14
|
|
|
James Monroe for me too. I want to hear more about Monrovia.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2019 19:41
|
|
|
Monroe I'm always a sucker for the old ones and really enjoy them (not to be knocking on any write-up of the 'new' ones because Fritz is currently killing it with his write-up of Nixon). This thread is one of the best things i've seen on SA, to the point where i've given multiple people IRL a link because i feel like they would appreciate it. Always with a caveat about SA in general if they feel the need to venture outside this thread.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2019 21:38
|
|
|
I really want J.Q. Adams, but it doesn't look like he's going to win this one, so let's have Monroe.
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2019 00:55
|
|
|
Casting my losing vote for McGovern - I mean McKinley
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2019 15:06
|
|
|
Assassinations are Important so McKinley
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2019 19:17
|
|
|
I finally caught up with this thread after reading it on and off for the last year, and I got to say: I love it. As a non-american, it's particularly fascinating, since I presume a lot of this is curriculum in US schools compared to here. Really well done to everyone, particularly Fritz Coldcockin, love your work. I gotta vote for McKinley, I think, since I know nothing about him but the name.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 08:04
|
|
|
Fritz Coldcockin posted:Good evening ignorant pigs! Put down your crack pipes and your beer bongs and pay attention! I vote H.W. Bush to continue the modern era theme.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 22:56
|
|
|
I vote for McKinley
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 23:14
|
|
|
Fritz Coldcockin posted:1. John Quincy Adams I vote you go back to the beginning and just proceed in chronological order. This will help your eventual book too.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2019 23:14
|
|
|
McKinley, please! And thank you.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2019 02:50
|
|
|
pseudanonymous posted:I vote you go back to the beginning and just proceed in chronological order. This will help your eventual book too. This would be a vote for Monroe, then. If this vote ends without a clear winner, you should do J.Q. Adams regardless, though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2019 19:45
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:It wasn't just McGovern's loss. Carter ran as a moderate and barely won in the Watergate aftermath, then Carter and Mondale both lost to Reagan and Dukakis lost to G. H. W. Bush. The country as a whole was embracing conservatism as the Dixiecrats had abandoned the Democratic party over civil rights. The path to an electoral majority largely disappeared for an overtly liberal agenda. The Democrats' abandonment of liberalism wasn't the cause, it was the effect of the country generally moving to the right in the '80s. pretty much. people also forget that the end of the 60s and most 70s were a lovely time in general, gently caress tons of crime, lots of reported serial killers. various race riots, than the gas crisis and iran hostage crisis and jonestown carter gets alot of the blame even though alot of it wasn't his fault and he wasn't president during alot of it. but people didn't just the left or liberals any more. it didn't help that the DNC had had a mini civil war and were only left with centrists. the dixicrats left to be in the GOP as did the evangelicals once carter didn't stick to his promises. also the lefties had been purged out for a while and were back to eating each other or becoming state centered.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 00:07
|
|
|
Part 5: “A Third-Rate Burglary” In the last update, we covered the major events of the Nixon Presidency. I showed you the triumphs and travails of the 37th President of the United States; how a 20+ year career in politics filled with amazing highs and crushing lows took some truly labyrinthine twists and turns to end at the highest peak. Nixon became President, and though he managed to secure a major arms control treaty with the Soviet Union and opened diplomatic relations with Communist China, his stubbornness on Vietnam and his paranoia during the Pentagon Papers affair threatened to consume him. All of it culminated, though, in a smashing, devastating reelection victory. Nixon won 520 electoral votes, defeating a hapless George McGovern in the 1972 Presidential contest. Polls showed as early as a month before Election Day that the Silent Majority was reasserting control, and Nixon was their standard-bearer. “Square America is coming back,” Nixon told Haldeman. Indeed it was. Nixon was right...almost. He was correctly predicting the end of the “Sixties”, the riotous era of revolution in civil rights and social and sexual mores, and he was presaging the Reagan Revolution by nearly a decade. Problem was that he wasn’t completely right. I’ll let Evan Thomas explain. quote:The furious revolt against authority that ran through the mid- and late 1960s, that had rocked the establishment and weakened hierarchies in the church and academe, that had turned children against their parents, was not quite spent. Some changes, like women’s liberation and an emboldened press, were permanent. What Nixon didn’t know yet is that there was one final authority figure yet to fall in this “great melodrama”, as Evan Thomas says. Then again, perhaps he did. It might explain why Nixon was not at peace on November 7, 1972, as the returns rolled in and he swept every state in the electoral college except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Later, in his memoirs, he would write, “I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me that victorious night…” I think I can, Mr. President. How Did This Happen?  After the break-in at Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office in the Pentagon Papers affair, all the “black-bag” operations had ceased and the Special Investigations Unit had found themselves without a purpose. Horrified at the destruction the burglars had wrought (and the added fact that it had been all for naught), the head of the Plumbers, Egil Krogh, had conferred with H.R. Haldeman and John Mitchell, and they had both been in agreement. The Plumbers were shut down. So where were two bumbling ex-intelligence officers like E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to go? Well, they went to work for this guy.  Jeb Magruder was the head of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, or, as it’s more popularly known, CREEP. On the surface, CREEP appeared to be a simple election committee--but its inner workings were far more seamy and sinister. Hunt and Liddy were hired on as espionage experts, because of course they were. I mean, if you’re trying to get a President reelected, what you really need are two ex-spooks known for loving up everything they touch on your payroll. On February 4, 1972, Liddy met with Attorney General Mitchell, White House Counsel John Dean, and Magruder in Mitchell’s office. It was there that Liddy first presented them with an espionage plan he’d cooked up, codenamed “Operation Gemstone”. Mitchell and Dean didn’t approve...of the whole thing, anyway. They did approve of one major facet: making this man a target for spying and sabotage.  Lawrence O’Brien was the current head of the Democratic National Committee, and he was a particularly vocal opponent of Richard Nixon’s. The antipathy between the two had reached a particularly high point when O’Brien had fed columnist Jack Anderson a story about Nixon killing an anti-trust investigation against the International Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in exchange for a $400K donation to the Republican Party. This is a whole other gross story for another time. One other thing you should know is that on May 2, 1972, J. Edgar Hoover, the insanely paranoid and cross-dressing original head of the FBI, died, and Nixon named this guy to replace him:  Louis Patrick “Pat” Gray had been a Nixon aide in 1960, an aide to Secretary Robert Finch at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and he’d worked in Mitchell’s Justice Department as an Assistant Attorney General responsible for handling anti-war demonstrations on federal property. He was an obsequious Nixon loyalist, but he told reporters that Nixon had asked him to operate the FBI in “a totally non-political way”. In fact, Nixon felt so strongly about this, Gray said, that he’d asked Gray’s wife, Beatrice, to resign her position at CREEP. If you buy any of this, I have some lovely beachfront property in Nebraska to sell you. Liddy and Hunt had gone back to the drawing board at CREEP and began a series of ill-fated attempts to bug and sabotage Democratic strongholds in Washington. They brought in these yodels from out of town.    Virgilio Gonzalez and Eugenio Martinez (left and middle) were Cuban expats and Bernard Barker (right) was former CIA and had Cuban/American dual citizenship. Liddy and Hunt also enlisted the services of this man.  James W. McCord Jr. was working as a security consultant for CREEP, and he was ex-CIA as well. With his team in place, Liddy and his fellow Keystone Kops put their plan into motion. Originally, there were six Cubans on the team--but when they checked into the Watergate Hotel on Friday, May 19, 1972, McCord had only brought four walkie-talkies with him. Two men were subsequently struck from the team. Yes, this is exactly as stupid as you think. Not only that, they were supposed to only refer to each other by aliases--but McCord got flustered and used real names by accident. Guys, this story gets even dumber. I’m actually going to let Rick Perlstein, author of the wonderful book Nixonland, tell the rest of it. quote:Hunt and the Cubans were disguised as businessmen attending a banquet in the Watergate’s Continental Room, which Hunt had booked for its convenient access to a service corridor. Apparently they decided neither inebriation nor torpor would hinder their mission: the epicurean Hunt catered an extravagant meal and libations (nursing a bleeding ulcer, he took his whiskey mixed with milk). He chased off the waiter with a large tip and ran a movie to muffle the sound of their final consultation. Then, at ten thirty, a security guard poked his head in to tell them their rental time was up. So they turned off the lights and hid in a closet until midnight. But the team’s locksmith—proprietor of the Missing Link Key Shop in Miami—couldn’t open the door to the service corridor. A second group, led by Liddy, simultaneously cased McGovern campaign headquarters across town, the first of several abortive break-in attempts there. The problem: damned idealistic McGovern volunteers never left the office, even in the middle of the night. Are you facepalming yet? The Cubans tried their hand at the Watergate again the next night, May 27. They used a fake visit to the Federal Reserve Board offices on the eighth floor as their cover...but the locksmith couldn’t crack the door to the DNC headquarters. “He says he doesn’t have the right tools,” Barker communicated to Hunt and Liddy’s listening post across the street. Thanks of course to the money they were being funneled, however (which we later find out comes from CREEP’s treasurer, Maurice Stans), they had the cash to fly the locksmith all the way back to Miami to get his tools and return. This gets, if possible, even dumber. Hunt and Liddy kept trying. Here’s Perlstein again. quote:Liddy’s team moved out for another, more predawn run at the McGovern offices. Liddy positioned himself in the back alley. In front, they stationed an operative who worked undercover in the McGovern campaign to tell them the lay of the office. A policeman spotted him loitering nervously on this crime-ridden street and ordered him to move along. The men John Mitchell paid for “security” had just barely avoided getting the chief counsel of the president of the United States’s campaign staff caught casing a burglary. Finally, the law of large numbers (or whatever) caught up to them and they happened upon a scheme that worked. With the aid of another of Hunt and Liddy’s friends, Frank Sturgis (his real name was Frank Fiorini, but he was using a cover identity from one of Hunt’s novels), the crew taped open a latch that was pried open by the locksmith early in the evening located on the B-2 level of the parking garage. It worked. Hunt and Liddy’s strike team would return later in the evening and rifle through DNC files, photograph documents, and install taps on two phones--that of R. Spencer Oliver, director of state chairmen, and Chairman Lawrence O’Brien’s secretary. That was McCord, of course. Using their flashlights, they signaled across the street to a watching Hunt and Liddy. “The horse is in the house,” McCord said. Only problem was, well...the taps weren’t what you’d call fruitful. One of them, the one on O’Brien’s secretary, was faulty. The other yielded very little in terms of value. Liddy brought the transcripts from the taps to Magruder in early June, and Magruder was very blunt in his assessment: “This stuff isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” Liddy apologized and explained that the first bug they’d planted wasn’t working out. He promised to fix it, and Mitchell gave him the go-ahead. Liddy summoned the Cubans back to D.C. and put together his team for the second go at the Watergate. He and Hunt rushed to put together plans for one more bugging job--this time, they had soldered a room microphone into a smoke detector. To facilitate the break-in, McCord simply walked into the Watergate right after business hours and took the elevator up, then on the way down again started taping locks, all the way to the parking garage. One problem: he taped them horizontally, not vertically, and he used masking tape...which meant they’d be visible to the casual observer. Not only that, the burglars were forced to wait until past midnight to begin the break-in--McGovern’s campaign volunteers stuck around till 12:45 A.M. By the time they’d forced open the DNC’s front door (the one lock they couldn’t tape), the night watchman was doing his rounds. He found one of the taped latches and called police. Within minutes, the D.C. Police had arrested the five hapless burglars--Sturgis, McCord, Gonzalez, Martinez, and Barker--and Hunt and Liddy panicked. They had been monitoring the operation from the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street, and when they saw the approaching police cars, they fled...leaving behind several consecutively-numbered hundred dollar bills, and a notebook containing Hunt’s name and White House telephone number. Thus did their amateurish bumbling doom Richard Nixon’s Presidency. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Distant Rumblings On Sunday morning, June 18, 1972, Nixon was vacationing in Key Biscayne, and upon awakening and smelling coffee brewing, he went to the kitchen to get a cup. On the kitchen table was the Miami Herald.  Nixon glanced at the story. Five men, four of whom were from Miami, had been arrested in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters after hours. One of them had identified himself as a former CIA employee. Three of them were Cuban natives (Barker had dual Cuban/American citizenship). They’d been wearing rubber gloves...and all of them were clad in suits. “I dismissed it as some sort of prank,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. He spent the rest of the day swimming, and that night he went bowling to relax. Bear this in mind: Hunt and Liddy had panicked. When they’d seen the cops close in, not only had they left a wealth of incriminating evidence behind in their room at the Howard Johnson’s, but they dithered until almost noon on June 17, 1972 before Liddy called his superiors at CREEP. Jeb Magruder was the one who took Liddy’s phone call, but by that point, the police had identified James McCord as a security consultant for CREEP, and they’d discovered that the burglars had broken into the DNC headquarters with the intent to wiretap it. This constituted a violation of federal eavesdropping laws, and the FBI was summoned. Magruder told Liddy to speak to the new Attorney General.  Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had been chosen to succeed John Mitchell at the Justice Department at the beginning of March when Mitchell resigned to go to work for CREEP. Liddy was to tell Kleindienst that Mitchell wanted the investigation halted at once. Liddy caught up with Kleindienst at the Burning Tree Golf Club in Maryland and delivered the message, but even he knew it was a fool’s errand. The police had been on the case for 12 hours by now, and they had already obtained search warrants for the burglars’ rooms at the Watergate. There, they found address books with “H. Hunt WH” and a White House telephone number...and a six-dollar check to his country club that Hunt had given to the Cubans to mail. This. Is. Stupid. As. Hell. One thing we need to understand before we go any further: there is absolutely no evidence, anywhere, whether it was in the testimony of White House aides later on or in the hundreds of hours of tapes from the White House recording system, that Richard Nixon knew of or ordered the Watergate break-in. It makes what happened next even more head-scratchingly stupid and unnecessary. Instantly, CREEP and its liaisons in the White House thought only of containment. The shredders in the White House--and at CREEP--began working overtime, destroying anything and everything associated with Hunt and Liddy’s team of ne’er-do-wells. Memos, photographs, wiretap logs, even things like hotel soap wrappers and $100 bills. Magruder burned all the files associated with Operation Gemstone in his home’s fireplace. The whole time, he was worried that a neighbor might summon the fire department. White House Counsel John Dean, with the help of John Ehrlichman, instructed Patrick Gray, the acting director of the FBI, to destroy any and all records of the Plumbers’ activities. Gray would hide the files for six months, then he’d burn them in his Christmas trash. Herbert Kalmbach, now Nixon’s personal lawyer, was summoned from California and given one task: collecting and paying out the hush money to each of the five burglars, Hunt, and Liddy. The burglars were told if they kept their mouths shut, they would each serve a brief sentence in a minimum-security facility then be set free by an act of presidential clemency. The strategy was referred to as “containment” by Nixon’s people. It has a different name in the legal profession: “obstruction of justice”. Yeah. It’s exactly as awful and nakedly corrupt as it sounds. As for the burglars, it was assumed that the most popular theory concerning them was the most plausible. Cuban exiles had trained in the jungles of Guatemala in the early 1960s to overthrow Fidel Castro, and there had been numerous firebombings of left-wing consulates and book publishers by anti-Castro zealots. It was easy to assume they’d be “capable of any madness,” as Rick Perlstein put it. Add that to Bernard Barker introducing himself to the court at arraignment as “Bernard Barker, anti-Communist”, and you had people rolling their eyes into the backs of their heads. The Cubans--Gonzalez, Martinez, and Barker--told the court that they acted out of fear that a potential President McGovern would forge a diplomatic alliance with Castro. They had, in fact, been coached to say this by White House operatives, and the D.C. gossip corps proved to be easy marks. They bought the story hook, line, and sinker. As Rick Perlstein writes, Hunt and Liddy were all too eager to fall on their swords for the President. quote:...Haldeman and the president took charge of the obstruction. “Hunt disappeared or is in the process of disappearing,” Haldeman assured the president. “He can un-disappear if we want him to. He can disappear to a Latin American country.” They found that if Liddy’s overexuberance had helped get them into this mess, he was a comically eager coconspirator to get them out of it. “If you want to put me before the firing squad and shoot me, that’s fine,” he said. “I’d kind of like to be like Nathan Hale.” Guy was loving NUTS. The plan was, like I explained, very simple. Supplied with hush money and the promises of clemency, the burglars would take the fall. Those “crazy Cubans” and their right-wing cohorts, McCord, Hunt, and Liddy, would confess, throw themselves on the mercy of the DC criminal courts, apologize for their overzealousness, and insist they had acted entirely on their own. If they could convince the judge they were just a bunch of right-wing wackos, the judge might grant them summary judgment and skip the criminal trial. That meant not risking Howard Hunt perjuring himself in a criminal deposition, for instance, if he was asked a question he couldn’t answer without implicating others. It also meant that a prosecutor couldn’t take a wild swing and ask Hunt if he’d ever met, oh, say, Chuck Colson--who all the “dirty tricks” were being filtered through. Ron Ziegler, the press secretary, dismissed the Watergate affair as “a third-rate burglary”. One problem, of course, was the FBI. See, here’s the thing: Acting Director Patrick Gray felt that a thorough, vigorous investigation of the break-in was just the thing to impress Nixon, a man he revered. This burglary was embarrassing to Nixon--so Gray felt that if it was investigated competently it would no longer be so. What he didn’t know, of course, is that the trail led right up to the Oval Office desk. More on that later. That wasn’t all. On June 18, 1972, at the headquarters of the Washington Post, two stringer reporters were assigned to cover the break-in story when it hit the news.  Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward (right) are, if possible, the most well-known names in the history of American journalism. They were single-handedly responsible for keeping the Watergate break-in story alive for months, even as other media outlets shifted their focus elsewhere. They were aided in their efforts, of course, by a mysterious anonymous source codenamed “Deep Throat” by Woodward and Bernstein. They met with Deep Throat a number of times in a parking garage in Rosslyn, Virginia over a period of six months. More on them--and Deep Throat--later. The White House hoped that convincing the burglars to fall on their swords might also take care of the million-dollar lawsuit the DNC had filed against CREEP, the burglars, James McCord’s private security firm, and “other conspirators whose names are now unknown.” John Mitchell called it “sheer demagoguery” on the part of DNC chair Larry O’Brien. The BALLS on these loving guys, I swear. The FBI was on the move. Gray’s agents found $4,500 in $100 bills stashed in the burglars’ hotel rooms at the Watergate, which they were able to trace back to Howard Hunt himself. As for Hunt, he’d disappeared--which frustrated investigators, since he’d been named in two of the burglars’ address books. They interviewed Hunt’s boss, Robert F. Bennett, son of Sen. Wallace Bennett (R-UT), and yes, this is the exact Bob Bennett you’re thinking of: the one who got run out of town by Mike Lee for being a RINO. Hunt worked for an outfit called the Mullen Company--but the FBI didn’t know that it was a CIA front, and, in fact, a supplier of many black-ops services to the Committee to Re-Elect the President...one of which was supplying Hunt a job as a cover. This loving guy thought he was James goddamn Bond. I’m shocked they didn’t call the place Universal Exports. The FBI made the first plan impossible. The burglars couldn’t just throw themselves on the mercy of the DC criminal courts, because too much evidence kept turning up. It meant that Haldeman and Ehrlichman had to gameplan a much more comprehensive obstruction-of-justice mechanism. Here’s Rick Perlstein. quote:Haldeman and Ehrlichman doped out the plan. “Both of us having been trying to think with one step away from it,” Haldeman explained Wednesday morning, June 21, “see whether there’s something that we can do other than just sitting here and watch it drop on us bit by bit as it goes along…. The problem there is, that’s why it’s important to get to the FBI. As of now, there’s nothing that puts Hunt into the case except his name in their notebooks with a lot of other things.” As for Woodward and Bernstein (or, as they were creatively dubbed, “Woodstein”), they were running another story on Thursday, June 22: “Employer of 2 Tied to Bugging Raised Money For Nixon”. Hunt was not the only connection, it turned out. Douglas Caddy, the co-founder of Young Americans For Freedom, had been hired by Hunt to represent the burglars as their criminal lawyer--and, of course, their boss, Bob Bennett, was tied to CREEP as chairman of some of its 75 dummy “committees” the White House used to funnel campaign contributions. That afternoon, Nixon held his 24th news conference. Postponed so that it wouldn’t look like a response to the break-in, Nixon received the first questions about what was quickly being dubbed “Watergate”. The presser itself was unremarkable. Nixon performed his usual song-and-dance, referring to Press Secretary Ron Ziegler’s statements on the subject, and added that he couldn’t comment on a case where “possible criminal charges were involved”. Boy, remember the days where the President wasn’t a stupid orange toddler who would do things like refrain from commenting on criminal cases? Problem was, behind closed doors, Nixon was starting to sweat. “For God’s sake, John,” Justice Department aide Robert Mardian said to John Dean, “someone’s got to slow Pat Gray down. He’s going like a crazy man.” Not for nothing, though, had Nixon installed a loyalist in Hoover’s chair at the FBI. Right after the press conference that night, Gray called Richard Helms, the CIA director, to point out how many of the burglars had CIA ties--and to ask if this was a CIA black op. Being the CIA director (and having no idea what Gray was talking about), Helms denied it--but Gray felt that his denial was due to his position as director and not the fact that he had no idea what was going on. That was the “eureka moment,” Perlstein writes. quote:And there it was: the trick to shut the FBI down. Mitchell came up with it that night, chatting with the eager-beaver White House counsel, John Dean, who’d been brought in to help with the scheming. They could simply tell the FBI that, yes, this whole break-in was part of a CIA operation. A secret CIA operation that the FBI had no business looking into. Telling a government agency to cease and desist an investigation that might blow CIA cover was not, after all, unheard of. They planned to have deputy CIA director Vernon Walters call Pat Gray and wave him off. “Mitchell’s recommendation that the only way to solve this, and we’re set up beautifully to do it...have Walters call Pat Gray and just say, ‘stay the hell out of this...this is, ah, business here we don’t want you to go any further on’.” Bottom line? “Call the FBI…don’t go any further into this case, period!” The Washington Post kept nipping at Nixon’s heels. On June 25th, Carl Bernstein wrote an article about a Miami architect’s claim that Bernard Barker had approached him as far back as 1971 to ask for a blueprint of the air-conditioning system at the Miami Beach Convention Center--the site of the 1972 Democratic National Convention. To counter it, the White House fed RNC chairman Bob Dole a line--and muddied the waters further. quote:“For the last week, the Republican Party has been the victim of a barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations by George McGovern and his partner-in-mudslinging, the Washington Post.…McGovern appears to have turned over the franchise for his media attack campaign to the editors…who have shown themselves every bit as surefooted along the low road…as McGovern.” That skillfully played into another emerging popular narrative—the Godfather narrative. “They think that political parties do this all the time,” Colson pointed out. “They think that companies do this. You know, there have been marvelous stories written about industrial espionage. How Ford agents go into General Motors to get the designs. People sort of expect this.” It looked as though the White House was containing the story. Columnists were increasingly focusing on the “insanity” of hiring a spook like James McCord for CREEP, but they were framing the bugging as a job for a right-wing anti-Castro group and blaming Larry O’Brien for “grabbing onto this astonishing episode for political gain”. It didn’t help that Democratic infighting was sucking all the air out of the room, either. McGovern was the left’s candidate--in many ways, the Democrats’ very own Goldwater, eight years removed--and his platform, progressive for its time, was castigated as too radical by a sizable contingent of his own party. In August of 1972, John Mitchell resigned as head of CREEP to be replaced by Rep. Clark MacGregor (R-MN). Even as he railed against McGovern for accusing Nixon of being “at least indirectly” involved in the Watergate break-in, accusing him of character assassination, it was as yet unclear as to why Mitchell had left his post. I think I know. The Ground Begins To Shake  On October 10th, “Woodstein” released another scoop. “FBI agents have established that the Watergate bugging incident stemmed from a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of President Nixon’s reelection and directed by officials of the White House and the Committee To Re-Elect the President,” the article read. Obviously the story merited attention. Reporters in the White House press room followed up. The President had said he’d assigned John Dean, the White House counsel, to get to the bottom of Watergate. Had that investigation turned up any evidence of political sabotage on the part of Nixon’s staff? Ron Ziegler’s response was a sight to see. I’ll give you the whole quote, as per Rick Perlstein. quote:“You state as a fact a story that was written, but later denied by the reelection committee,” Ziegler said. The reporter re-torqued the question: whether the Post’s story was factual or not, had the investigation the president said he had ordered come up with any facts? The Nixon White House turned their fire on the one newspaper keeping the story alive. In a speech to black Republicans, Bob Dole said, “In the final days of this campaign, like the desperate politicians whose fortunes they seek to save, the Washington Post is conducting itself by journalistic standards that would cause mass resignations on principle from the [drug-addled D.C. “freak” newspaper] Quicksilver Times.” Dole accused the McGovern campaign of using the Post as a catspaw to prop up his flailing campaign. CREEP chairman Clark MacGregor continued the party that evening when he said that the “Washington Post’s credibility has today sunk lower than that of George McGovern.” quote:“Using innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources, and huge scare headlines, the Post has maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate—a charge the Post knows—and a half dozen investigations have found—to be false.” In very Trumpian fashion, the Nixon people then pivoted to accusing the media of ignoring the incidents at Nixon offices in Hollywood, Phoenix, New York, and Boston, where Molotov cocktails had been thrown through windows and others had been vandalized. In closing, MacGregor mentioned that the Post was “complicit” in Daniel Ellsberg’s crimes “for which he faces a possible 115 years in a federal penitentiary”. This was before the break-in at Dr. Fielding’s office was made public, of course, which we know ended with Ellsberg’s charges being dropped. Life comes at you fast. It was now the Washington Post vs. the Nixon White House, and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee was not afraid of Nixon. “Time will judge between Clark MacGregor’s press releases and the Washington Post’s reporting...the facts are on the record, unchallenged by contrary evidence.” What we were seeing was unprecedented--a President was discrediting a journalistic institution as though it were a political opponent. There were shades of what he’d done to Jerry Voorhis and Helen Douglas in the Nixon White House’s tactics. And it is why Nixon could not relax on election night, even as the returns poured in showing him steamrolling George McGovern all over the country: he knew that when the smoke cleared, the Democrats, the media, and the courts were going to go hard after Watergate...and he was going to try and destroy them before they destroyed him. The day after the election, the staff met--and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman abruptly demanded all their resignations. He did so again at the Cabinet meeting that afternoon. Now, it’s customary for a President’s staff and Cabinet to resign at the official end of the first term if the President is re-elected--it gives the President the option to simply not accept and keep them on for the second term. But since Nixon did this so abruptly--and he demanded their resignations now rather than letting them trickle in over the months between Election Day and Inauguration Day--his closest associates were confused and a bit shocked. They had expected to be thanked. Instead, as Stephen Ambrose puts it, “they got slapped”. As for the burglars themselves, their trial had been postponed until after the election--it began in January 1973. Nixon had also received some help from Congress--House Minority Leader Gerald Ford (R-MI) had managed to get the House Banking Committee’s hearings on the source of the burglars’ money postponed until after the election too--which had muted the impact of the scandal on the November election. But now it was January of 1973, and those chickens were coming home to roost. Even as Americans had swept Nixon back into office, they had also chosen a Democratic House and Senate--and that meant Nixon’s enemies would select the chairmen of the committees...including the special investigative committee Democrats said they would form to investigate the Watergate break-in. Meanwhile, the burglars, Hunt, and Liddy were escalating their demands for hush money. On November 13, 1972, right after the election, Hunt had called Chuck Colson and demanded more. “After all, we’re protecting the guys who were really responsible...but this is a two way street...we think that now is the time when some moves should be made and, uh, surely your cheapest commodity available is money.” Colson had recorded the conversation, and he gave the tape to John Dean--who in turn played it for Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They told Dean to have John Mitchell take care of Hunt’s demands--he had set a deadline for receipt of the payment of November 25. Mitchell got the money in cash from Haldeman’s secret White House fund; then he passed it on to a CREEP official named Fred LaRue, who gave it to Hunt’s lawyer. Yeah, this scandal is so crazy loving labyrinthine it isn’t even funny. We had payouts on the payouts. Again, I have to stress: all this was being done with the hope that Hunt, Liddy, and their men would plead guilty and say nothing about who they worked for. Their sentences would short--they were first-time offenders and they had not actually taken anything. However, Judge John Sirica, the trial judge in the burglars’ case, put a spike in the idea that he’d deliver summary judgment when he opened pre-trial hearings. “What did these men go into the headquarters for?” he asked. “Was their sole purpose political espionage? Were they paid? Were there financial gains? Who started this? Who hired them?” Another blow struck the Nixon White House’s cover-up when E. Howard Hunt’s wife Dorothy was killed in a plane crash. Why did this matter? Well, she’d been acting as a courier, delivering the hush money...and she’d had $10,000 of it in her purse. The police found it in the wreckage, stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. There was no evidence of sabotage of the plane or anything, but Dorothy’s death threw Hunt into a deep depression and made him even more mercurial...as well as heightening suspicions that the White House was paying blackmail money. That same day, the Washington Post revealed the existence of the Plumbers...and it identified Hunt and Liddy as two of the unit’s major players. Ron Ziegler did confirm that the Plumbers had existed but they’d been shut down after January 1972 and played no role in Watergate. The story was not going away, and Nixon knew it. He told Haldeman as much on December 11...which resulted in the staff starting to point fingers at each other. Haldeman told Nixon that Chuck Colson “may have been aware of the Watergate business”. Nixon was floored. In a private meeting on January 6, Colson explained that Hunt was increasing his demands in return for keeping his silence...and James McCord had declared he was going to plead not guilty and indicated he might be testifying in open court. Colson also pointed out that the burglars thought they’d been working for John Mitchell and hoped he’d intervene on their behalf...but McCord and the Cubans had no direct information. “They can’t hurt us,” Colson said. But Hunt and Liddy had “direct, (unintelligible) meetings, discussions are very incriminating to us.” Five days later the Senate Democratic Caucus created a special Senate Select Committee to investigate the Watergate break-in and other Republican espionage activities against Democrats in 1972. To chair the committee, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) tapped this man.  Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) had served in the Senate since 1954. He’d been head of the investigative committee that had brought down Joe McCarthy, and though he’d been the South’s legal expert during the Congressional debates on civil rights, Ervin had bucked the trend and become a champion for civil rights in the latter half of his career. On January 11, the first of what would be many wheels on the Watergate coverup began shedding lug nuts--James McCord and G. Gordon Liddy pled not guilty in open court, even as Hunt and the Cubans did so. Two days later, John Dean called H.R. Haldeman to warn him that “McCord is off the reservation.” He even used the word “blackmail”--an ominous development right before Nixon’s second inauguration. The trial itself was unremarkable. It ended less than a month later, and both Liddy and McCord, the two remaining defendants, were found guilty on all charges. In the course of their trial, CREEP Finance Chair Hugh Sloan told the court that nearly $200,000 had been paid out to Liddy in 1972 with the approval of John Mitchell and former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans. Sloan said he had no idea what had been done with the money. When Judge Sirica said that it would take Congress to fully investigate what had happened, the Senate responded in decisive fashion. They voted 70-0 to formally establish the Senate Select Committee on Watergate, the committee that had been proposed in January, and they denied any Republican efforts to include investigations into the 1964 and 1968 elections as well (this was, of course, a cynical attempt at sabotaging the committee’s work with a series of whataboutism accusations). On the same day, February 7, the New York Times’ Seymour Hersh named Haldeman’s assistant, Gordon Strachan, as the White House contact with CREEP’s “dirty tricks” arm (if anyone wants to write up something about Donald Segretti and Nixon’s ratfuckers, they’re welcome to), as well as the contact with Liddy and Hunt. That was enough for Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert. There was something “there” there. He announced he’d be bringing all seven of the Watergate burglars--the Cubans, McCord, Hunt, Liddy, and Sturgis--before a grand jury in an attempt to “explore every conceivable avenue” of possible higher-level involvement. Nixon met with Haldeman and Ehrlichman to plan a strategy for the Ervin Committee hearings. They would do whatever they could to “discredit [the] hearings--cooperate publicly but quietly obstruct”. One method was going to be making L. Patrick Gray Hoover’s permanent replacement--but Nixon met with him prior to nomination and secured his pledge of “loyalty” beforehand with some very clever sleight-of-hand about his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. According to Nixon, he and Hoover were real bros. He “all but overwhelmed Gray with his references to the ‘deep personal friendship’ he and Hoover enjoyed,” Stephen Ambrose writes. Gray did not tell Nixon that he had destroyed documents on his own accord relating to the Plumbers’ activity that John Dean had given him from E. Howard Hunt’s safe, nor did he remind Nixon that he’d told Dean to sit in on FBI interviews with White House personnel. “I’m a Nixon loyalist. You’re goddamn right I am,” Gray assured Nixon. On February 28th, Nixon met with John Dean again to discuss Gray’s upcoming testimony before the Senate. The committee had demanded Dean come testify about his relationship with Gray, but that wasn’t the focus of the meeting. Nixon was worried that Judge Sirica was going to try and work the burglars to see which one of them would “break down”, as Nixon put it. Dean didn’t think so, as long as the burglars got their promised clemency in a reasonable amount of time. What did Ervin’s committee want, asked Nixon? Big fish. Haldeman, Colson, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, or, as Dean suggested, himself. To that, Nixon waved him off. Dean was a lawyer and he’d had no involvement with CREEP, and this had been done by CREEP. Surely he had nothing to fear. Still, even as Dean departed the Oval Office, nothing was settled. Questions remained. In March, the earthquakes began to get more frequent. On the 2nd, at an impromptu press conference, Nixon said that John Dean, in the course of his own investigation of Watergate, that “no one on the White House staff, at the time he conducted the investigation--that was last July and August--was involved or had knowledge of the Watergate matter.” When a reporter asked if he’d allow Dean to testify at the Gray confirmation hearings, Nixon said no--but he would of course supply any information needed. It was then that we heard “executive privilege” for the first time--Nixon swore that executive privilege would not be used as a shield to prevent embarrassing information from becoming public, but “only in those particular instances in which disclosure would harm the public interest”. Suuuuuuuuuure. On March 20, Nixon met with Haldeman to discuss what would happen when Judge Sirica sentenced the burglars that Friday. The President was worried. James McCord had made it clear: he didn’t want to go to jail. What would happen if he decided to talk? “He would have a lot on Mitchell,” Haldeman said. His deputy, Gordon Strachan, as the go-between for CREEP and the White House, would be vulnerable as well. Nixon was very clear: the worst thing would be to give the impression of a White House cover-up. He’s so close to getting it. As Stephen Ambrose writes, the White House was still hopeful they could contain this at the level it was currently sitting at. quote:Haldeman tried some optimism: “John Dean’s basic approach to this is one of containment—keep it in this box and he thinks he can. And that box—goes on the theory that Liddy did it without authority from above. . . . Liddy was the responsible guy. . . . He’s the highest guy.” The trouble with that, Nixon interjected, was “the judge [Sirica] blasted the hell out of that (unintelligible) didn’t get cooperation and so forth.” Haldeman was still hopeful: “Liddy apparently is a little bit nuts and a masochist and apparently he wants to, looks to the martyrdom of doing this. He kind of likes it. . . . That’s Dean’s hope.” Imagine being in a position where you had to hang your hat on Gordon Liddy’s psychosis. Not enviable. The problem was becoming clearer: There were too many hands in this cookie jar and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of all of them. Nixon’s diary entry from that night, March 20, makes that clear: “We are really caught here without really knowing how to handle it.” That’s something I want you to understand, folks: that Nixon knew there was a not-insignificant chance that he’d end up in a lot of trouble by the time this was over unless the blocks stacked exactly the way the White House wanted. The next day, however, is one of the most pivotal moments in the Watergate scandal’s timeline. John Dean met again with Nixon, and the President asked him for his judgment “as to where it stands, and where we go now.” Dean was blunt. I’m blockquoting this because it’s perhaps one of the most memorable quotes from the Nixon tapes. quote:“We have a cancer--within, close to the Presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding, it grows geometrically now because it compounds itself.” Mixed metaphors aside, you can see the sentiment John Dean was trying to communicate to Nixon. He gave Nixon a complete rundown of every “intelligence” operation Liddy had planned from 1971 onward--covering Liddy, Mitchell, Magruder, Colson, Hunt, and Strachan and implicating all of them. They’d been getting information from the DNC bugs the burglars had planted the first time, Dean said. Had Haldeman known where they were getting the information? Dean said he didn’t know, but he did know that at one point Haldeman had ordered the saboteurs to change their focus over from Muskie to McGovern--and he’d used Strachan and Magruder as a conduit. Then Dean described that it was getting harder and harder to keep the burglars, Hunt, and Liddy quiet. quote:More troubles: “This is going to be a continual blackmail operation by Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans.” Further, McCord wanted commutation, and Colson had talked to Hunt about commutation, and these “are promises, they are commitments. They are the very sort of thing that the Senate is going to be looking most for.” Dean hoped the Ervin Committee would not find out. Nixon said that it would be “pretty hard” to uncover because it was all in cash. Dean said Mitchell was raising funds, because “he’s one of the ones with the most to lose”. Nixon cut him off. What he said next is perhaps the most damning evidence the Watergate committee would find to implicate Richard Nixon personally in the scandal cover-up. Here’s Stephen Ambrose. quote:Nixon cut him off. “How much money do you need?” he asked bluntly. That was it: the Rubicon had officially been crossed. Nixon was now on the record as encouraging and facilitating the cover-up, knowing that White House associates could find themselves in very hot legal water. The blackmail would be paid, and Nixon would become more and more involved, guiding his aides, giving them orders, and telling them where and how to raise the money. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Aug 27, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 02:13
|
|
|
The Knives Come Out The atmosphere in the Nixon White House had always been rather tense and thick with intrigue; much like the man himself. Now, however, it took on a new, more sinister tone. Because of the fact that Nixon was now actively involved in the cover-up, because of the DNC and Ellsberg break-ins, and because of the fact that they’d tried to use the CIA to divert the FBI off the trail, Nixon and all his top aides now had glaring vulnerabilities...and those vulnerabilities were causing them to sleep with one eye open. John Dean put it bluntly. “Everybody is now starting to watch out for their own behind...they’re getting their own counsel…’How do I protect my rear end?’ They’re scared and that’s bad.” This atmosphere created an even bigger problem: even the conspirators couldn’t be honest with each other. All participants in their conversations lied, dissembled, and pretended. Everyone had a vested interest in hiding their knowledge while trying to find out what others knew. Dean asked Nixon if he could meet with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell to “figure out how this can be carved away from you...Mr. President. It’s not something you are involved in.” We know, of course, that this isn’t true. Not any longer anyway. Nixon was as active a participant as the others--and the more Dean talked to Nixon during this March 21 meeting, the more Dean became certain of that fact. At least, that’s what his memoirs say. “Some people are going to have to go to jail,” Dean told Nixon, even if Magruder and other CREEP officials were granted immunity so they could testify in open court and tell the truth without damaging Nixon. “Who?” Nixon asked. “Me,” said Dean. He explained he was open to an obstruction of justice charge--mainly for his meddling with the FBI’s investigation and for the fact that he menaced White House officials during their interviews with the FBI’s investigators, as well as the blackmail payments. “Well,” Nixon said, “I wonder if that part of it can’t be--” After a pause, he kept going. “I wonder if it doesn’t--let me put it frankly, I wonder if that doesn’t have to be continued?” Dean listened as Nixon outlined his idea. Here’s Stephen Ambrose with an explanation. quote:“Let me put it this way,” Nixon continued, “let us suppose that you get, you get the million bucks and you get the proper way to handle it, and you could hold that side. It would seem to me that would be worthwhile.” The pair discussed their options, who to “cut loose”, who to grant clemency to, but the problem was there were too many moving parts. The end result? quote:The fact was, they were helpless. It was the damnedest thing. This conversation took place in the Oval Office. On Nixon’s desk there was a red telephone that dramatically signified his awesome power. But he could not manage to wriggle out of the consequences of a simple break-in in which no weapons were used, no one got hurt, nothing was stolen. The plan was the non-existent “Dean Report”: the record that did not exist of the investigation into Watergate Dean had not performed. Nixon kept clinging to this idea that he could extract himself from this mess by claiming that all he had known was what was in the Dean Report, even after the Ervin Committee made its discoveries. Many of his aides would go down, but Nixon himself would remain blameless. That was the idea, anyway. Problem was, Dean didn’t want to write it--but Nixon ordered him to go to Camp David on March 24 to do it anyway. The following Monday, to Nixon’s horror, Judge Sirica dropped the hammer on the burglars. Hunt got 35 years, the Cubans got 40 each, and Liddy 20 years. Sirica recommended that they cooperate fully with the grand jury--something that could affect the final sentence...but as awful as this was, it wasn’t the worst thing to happen to Nixon that day. See, James McCord didn’t want to go to jail. He REALLY didn’t want to go to jail. It wasn’t about money anymore, it was about survival--and McCord was no Nathan Hale like Liddy. He had written Judge Sirica a letter on his personal stationery--in which he said that he and the other burglars had been put under political pressure to plead guilty and remain silent.   I’ve timg’d those so that you can read them. McCord said he feared for his life, but Dean had assured Nixon that McCord didn’t know enough to hurt him. However, McCord testified under oath in front of the Ervin Committee that Hunt and Liddy had told him the break-in was cleared with Mitchell, Dean, Colson, and Haldeman, among others. This was a path that led directly into the White House...and the highest echelons of power. As if that wasn’t bad enough, John Dean had realized something when Nixon sent him to Camp David--he was going to be hung out to dry. Nixon would finger him when the Ervin Committee invariably found some very embarrassing things, and Dean would be cast as the architect of the cover-up. Historians agree that this moment is probably the first time Dean contemplating flipping on Nixon. Republicans in the Senate were starting to squirm. Sen. Robert Packwood (R-OR) called Watergate “a dagger in the heart” of the Republican Party and had called on Nixon to come clean. Sen. Jacob Javits (R-NY) echoed Packwood, and Sen. Lowell Weicker (R-CT) even went so far as to demand Haldeman’s resignation. Sam Ervin told Nixon he would not allow informal testimony by White House aides--a suggestion Nixon had floated rather than public hearings. He, uh, used some pretty colorful words, along with a quote I really liked: “Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn’t belong to White House aides”. YOU HEAR THAT, YOU FAT ORANGE PIGBOY?! If the aides did not respond to subpoenas they would be arrested and cited for contempt. Christ, Sam Ervin had more balls than the entire Democratic caucus in the House does now. What’s more, it almost broke Haldeman. He told Nixon that he wanted to come clean--admit to raising the blackmail money, as well as his role in the dirty tricks campaign waged against McGovern and Muskie in 1972. He’d already drawn up a statement and he felt the best way to release it would be to give it to CBS’ Dan Rather. Why him? No idea. Nixon was horrified. “No, Bob, put that out of your mind,” he ordered Haldeman. He did, however, abandon Pat Gray as nominee for FBI director. Gray had testified that Dean had lied to him about whether E. Howard Hunt had an office in the White House, a piece of disloyalty Nixon was not prepared to tolerate. On April 5, Haldeman called Gray and asked him to request that his name be withdrawn. Gray did so immediately. “Nobody could feel worse about it than I do,” Nixon told him. Yeah, that’s crap. On April 7, from Air Force One, Nixon sat down with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They were instructed to tell John Dean he was free to testify before Earl Silbert’s grand jury, but not to the Ervin Committee. No, Nixon said he wanted to strike a deal with Ervin on the conditions under which his people would testify. This is like trying to bluff a poker hand when you’re holding two bar coasters. Nixon had no idea that at that very moment, on the advice of his lawyer, Dean was making arrangements to meet with federal prosecutors. He would trade them every piece of information he had for immunity. He wouldn’t allow Nixon to use him as the fall guy for Watergate. Oh, by the way? When Nixon tried to get Ervin to remove the TV cameras from the hearing room, Ervin told him to gently caress off. The hearings would be televised--for all the world to see. As Stephen Ambrose writes, the “pea under the walnut” kept moving, and one of the difficult parts of reading the Watergate transcripts later on was trying to keep up with all the lies and obfuscations. On April 19, Nixon informed one of his lawyers, special counsel Richard Moore, of the March 21 meeting with Dean. Nixon lied, of course--he told Moore that when Dean had said it would cost a million dollars to keep the burglars quiet, Nixon had replied, “You can’t do that.” He told Moore, “I wasn’t prepared to pay any drat blackmail.” Dick, buddy, if you can’t even tell your own lawyers the truth… Nixon knew that with Dean outside the tent, that March 21 meeting could doom him forever. quote:They needed each other. They drew together by agreeing to lie together. The question was, who triggered the pay-off by calling Mitchell? Was that call made after a meeting with the President? Was the pay-off then a result of Nixon’s orders? Nixon wanted to strongarm Dean. “Look,” he told Haldeman, “he’s [Dean’s] gotta look down the road to, to one point, that, uh, there’s only one man that could restore him to the ability to practice law in the case things still go wrong.” He of course did not have to say who that man was; the entire room knew. Anyone called before the Ervin committee would stick to the line that the money raised and given to Hunt, in particular, was for legal bills, NOT for obstruction of justice purposes. Duh. Here’s Ambrose to explain the White House’s ever-evolving strategy and where it is now. quote:Turning back to resignations, Nixon said he would have none of that. “Whatever we say about Harry Truman,” Nixon went on, “while it hurt him, a lot of people admired the old bastard for standing by people who were guilty as hell, and, drat it, I am that kind of person.” The President ordered Ehrlichman to reach all those involved and give them the “straight drat line” that “we raised money . . . but, uh, we raised money for a purpose that we thought was perfectly proper.” (When he released his own edited version of this tape a year later, Nixon wrote at this point, “RN is referring to E, H, not to himself.”) “We didn’t want to shut ‘em up. These men were guilty.” Nixon would stand by his people...for now. The Death Of Irony  The White House began to vacillate back and forth--some wanted to come clean, others wanted to release statements to the press that fingered CREEP and CREEP alone for the break-in, others wanted Nixon himself to give a Checkers-esque speech denying all responsibility and hope that the spectacle of it overwhelmed the reality. Here’s Ambrose again. quote:After Kleindienst left, Nixon called Haldeman on the telephone. As usual, the telephone tape recorder was loaded and working. They talked about a special prosecutor, and didn’t like that idea; they talked about testifying before the Ervin Committee, and didn’t like that either. Yes, you read that right: we were now officially talking about throwing White House officials and high-placed CREEP officers to the wolves to protect Nixon. Give them Mitchell, Nixon said, and the Watergate committee would run out of gas. People would start thinking of it more as a witch hunt rather than a legitimate investigation, and Woodward and Bernstein would be told to stop publishing articles that no one was reading. Problem was that it wasn’t just Mitchell. quote:...Nixon met at 1:12 P.M. with Kleindienst in his EOB office. The Attorney General said he had been up from 1 to 5 A.M. talking with Henry Petersen and Earl Silbert, respectively the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney and the prosecutor in the Watergate trial. They had told him what Magruder and Dean had been saying; the upshot was that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were in deep trouble. Nixon expressed surprise. He said they had assured him they were clean. The media’s Eye of Sauron now turned to Nixon’s two closest advisers--H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The Berlin Wall, as they were known, had been with “the Boss” from the beginning--now, Nixon was being told that he might have to cut them loose if he wanted to stay President. Nixon met with them and told them of Henry Petersen’s recommendation. Haldeman offered to resign, but Ehrlichman said, “What about brother Dean?” “I can’t fire Dean,” Nixon protested. “I can’t risk his going after the President.” Ehrlichman thought, however, he could persuade Dean to resign. Everything was going swimmingly here, until Nixon asked what Dean had done with the material from Howard Hunt’s safe. Ehrlichman told him that Dean had given it to Pat Gray. “What did Gray do with it?” Nixon asked. Ehrlichman said he didn’t know, but he’d call Gray and find out...and when he did, he returned to the meeting, ashen-faced. “Gray told me not to tell anyone we had turned over the Hunt papers to him,” he said. “Why not?” Nixon asked. “He burned them. In his backyard.” The material, if you’ll recall, contained every dumbshit bugging project Chuck Colson had ever cooked up--including the bogus cables that Hunt was going to use to implicate John Kennedy in the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem. Ehrlichman’s memoirs note that Nixon was “relieved” when he heard of the destruction of the evidence, but Ehrlichman recalls being “dumbfounded”. This is probably not true--his personal notes don’t support this at all. When Haldeman and Ehrlichman were gone, Nixon called John Dean. Yup. Here’s Stephen Ambrose, since he’s doing a much better job than I am. quote:Dean appeared about 9:15 P.M. Ehrlichman and Haldeman were gone. Dean found Nixon sitting in his easy chair with both feet up on the ottoman, wearing a smoking jacket. He noticed a smell of liquor on his breath. Nixon appeared exhausted. His trousers were in wrinkles and his necktie was stained. Nixon offered a drink, which Dean refused. Emphasis mine. Seems like someone remembered, through his drunken haze, that the tape recorders were still running. On April 16, Nixon and Ehrlichman met over breakfast. They’d drafted letters of resignation for Dean and they were prepared to “suggest” that he sign them. See, here’s the thing: Nixon was terrified of what Dean was telling Earl Silbert’s team about the wiretaps in 1969--you recall, the ones they placed on Kissinger’s staff and a number of news reporters? Ehrlichman said it was all covered by executive privilege--unless Dean talked. The other problem, of course, was the non-existent “Dean Report”--why had the President not acted when he’d “received it”? Ron Ziegler recommended that Nixon declare that Dean had “disserved” him, and therefore had ordered Ehrlichman to make another one. The problem was that this was like a political game of Hot Potato, except the guy holding the potato at the end would be fired and go to jail. Over the course of a few hours, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon proceeded to rewrite the events of the last few weeks. Ehrlichman claimed that he told Hunt to “forget it” when Hunt threatened to blackmail him, for example. Nixon professed astonishment--he told them he had no idea Hunt had tried to do that, when in fact Dean had made that fact perfectly clear in the infamous March 21 meeting. When Haldeman and Ehrlichman left, Dean entered. Nixon asked him what he thought about resigning. Dean told him, “I think it ought to be Dean, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman.” “Well,” Nixon replied, “I thought Dean at this moment.” He gave Dean the two letters that he and Ehrlichman had penned earlier. One said Dean was resigning immediately as a “result of my involvement in the Watergate matter”, the other was requesting an immediate leave of absence for the same reason. I think that’s when Dean realized just how far Nixon was willing to go to pin this whole mess on him, to be honest. For the rest of that meeting, as they rehashed old topics from the March 21 meeting, Nixon continued to claim that this was the first time he’d heard these claims, followed by more stories about what he’d done to get to the bottom of the matter. Here’s Stephen Ambrose with some of Nixon’s more eyebrow-raising revisionist history. quote:Nixon went on to make up a story for Dean to tell the grand jury. He should say that when he told Nixon that there was a cancer on the Presidency, “the President went out and investigated on his own . . . and as a result of the President’s actions this thing has been broken.” Still, Dean should not lie. But “if you feel I have done the right thing, the country is entitled to know it. Because we are talking about the Presidency here.” That evening, Nixon spoke to Henry Petersen on the phone. Fred LaRue, one of the bagmen for CREEP, had testified before a grand jury that afternoon. Upon securing a promise from Nixon that he would not repeat what Petersen said, Petersen told him the bad news: LaRue had admitted to participating in a cover-up and obstruction of justice, and he had fingered Mitchell as the ringleader at CREEP. Even worse? Dean had gone to Earl Silbert and told him that in return for full immunity he would testify that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were involved as well. Well, that was it. The next day, Ehrlichman suggested Nixon fire Dean. Nixon was resistant. Dean knew too many details about the blackmail--for example, he knew about the $120,000 payment to Howard Hunt. He didn’t think that Dean would spill the beans on any conversations he’d had with Nixon, but he also knew: Dean wasn’t a loyalist like Haldeman and Ehrlichman were. “I know you’ll go out and throw yourselves on a damned sword. I’m aware of that. I’m trying to think the thing through with that in mind because, dammit, you’re the two most valuable members on the staff...you’re the two most loyal and the two most honest,” Nixon told Haldeman and Ehrlichman. How would they deal with Dean? Well, if he couldn’t be fired, suspend him, Haldeman said. That got nowhere. Ehrlichman suggested making the White House too hostile for Dean to continue--in effect making it an adverse work environment. Nixon had another idea--cut off Dean’s legs by denying him immunity. He could do that by making a blanket statement that no one on the White House staff should have immunity. Ehrlichman liked that. “This has been a law and order administration,” he pointed out. The loving BALLS. Henry Petersen showed up in the Oval just after 2:30 PM that afternoon. Nixon told him what he intended to do, but Petersen expressed alarm. If Nixon denied Dean immunity, and Dean refused to talk, Haldeman and Ehrlichman would walk away scot-free. “Let me handle [them],” Nixon told Petersen. Petersen was skeptical. On top of the fact that he felt Haldeman and Ehrlichman had made Nixon “very very vulnerable, unwittingly or otherwise”, he warned Nixon that if Dean went to trial, he’d put the whole Nixon administration on trial. His lawyers were already saying as much. At his scheduled press conference that afternoon, though, Nixon forged ahead with his plan. quote:...he announced that on March 21, “as a result of serious charges which came to my attention, some of which were publicly reported, I began intensive new inquiries into this whole matter.” He said he had reviewed the facts with Kleindienst and Petersen and could now report “that there have been major developments in the case concerning which it would be improper to be more specific now, except to say that real progress has been made in finding the truth.” He pledged that if any member of his staff were indicted, he would immediately suspend that man. Ron Ziegler followed his boss, announcing that any previous statements denying Watergate involvement by White House staff members were now “inoperative”. The cancer that John Dean spoke of was metastasizing...and it was now infecting the White House. On April 18, Dean’s anger boiled over. Leonard Garment, his possible successor, told Nixon that Dean was “charging around the White House like a wild animal”. The press had about had it too--the knives were out for Ron Ziegler at the morning briefing. Clark Mollenhoff, a former Nixon aide and now the Des Moines Register’s point man in the WH Press Corps, roared his anger up at Ziegler. “Do you feel free to stand up there and lie and put out misinformation and then come around later and say it’s ‘inoperative’? That’s what you’re doing. You’re not entitled to any credibility at all.”  Throwing some FIRE. If only our reporters had the stones to say this to that walleyed ghoul Sarah Sanders.It was becoming increasingly clear that if John Dean did what Nixon was afraid he might do, the whole cover-up would come apart. The next morning Dean issued a statement in which he said “I will not become a scapegoat in the Watergate case.” Nixon went into a crouch. With Haldeman and Ehrlichman, he groused, “Don’t know what the son-of-a-bitch is going to say [next]...that goddamn Dean”. So how to stop Dean? Petersen again broached the subject of offering up Haldeman and Ehrlichman on April 19. They could take leaves of absence, he said. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were reluctant. So was Nixon. Who would replace them? “There ain’t anybody around here to do this son-of-a-bitching thing. It’s hard to find anyone that wasn’t involved.” Yeah, Dick? This is what happens when you engage in a massive criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. At Key Biscayne that weekend, Nixon talked with Ron Ziegler and speechwriter Pat Buchanan. The weekend papers were loaded with speculation: about what Dean knew, what he’d told the prosecutors, what evidence Dean had, and what John Mitchell had told Earl Silbert’s grand jury. The question was now whether or not he had to fire his closest aides. For Ziegler and Buchanan’s part, they told him that no one who was innocent should be fired--but that any aide who could not maintain his viability should do the “right thing” and resign. That Sunday was Easter Sunday. The following Monday, Nixon met again with Buchanan and Ziegler--and they were unanimous. Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have to resign. Nixon told Buchanan he should call and tell them. Buchanan said Ziegler should do it, but eventually Nixon decided, “I will face this on my own...I must separate the Presidency from them.” He didn’t. Ziegler ended up making the calls. Haldeman, initially accepted. Ehrlichman, however, dug in his heels, and then after talking with his lawyers, Haldeman did too. “He knew how to arouse Nixon’s emotions,” Stephen Ambrose writes. It was easy to spin the decision to force their resignation as a “victory of the establishment against Nixon,” something Nixon desperately didn’t want. He backed down. Haldeman and Ehrlichman would remain, for now, in the fold. On April 22, a small sliver of good news arrived...but, as Stephen Ambrose points out, it was too little too late. quote:...Liddy announced that no matter what the President told him to do, he would not talk to the prosecutors or the grand jury or Sirica or anyone else. A month earlier that would have been wonderful news for Nixon, but by now it scarcely mattered. Hunt had not talked, either, something that a month earlier Nixon was ready to pay $1 million to obtain, and for which he had ordered blackmail paid; yet by late April it hardly mattered what Hunt did. Magruder had talked. LaRue had talked. Mitchell was in danger of turning on the White House. Worst of all, Dean—who knew drat near everything—was threatening to talk, even beyond what he had already revealed. Well, good job on betting that Liddy was too crazy to crack, I guess? The key now was trying to either keep Dean from talking. Why? Well, Ehrlichman was the first to use the word “impeachment”. He told Nixon in no uncertain terms that if Dean was “totally out of control” that it was entirely possible that Congress could draw up articles of impeachment based on the things he said in the March 21 meeting. After all, they now knew there was a tape...but as long as they possessed the only recording, they could keep Dean’s assertions to a “he-said/he-said” level: if Dean had the tape, it would have been a disaster. Haldeman was ordered to listen to the tape of the March 21 meeting and do a threat assessment. On April 26, Nixon met with Haldeman to hear his thoughts. He decreed that no taped information would ever leave the Oval Office, nor would any information about the existence of the taping system. Haldeman was ordered to tell no one, not even Ehrlichman, about the March 21 tape. The talk then turned to impeachment. “My God, what the hell have we done to be impeached?” To Ehrlichman’s suggestion that he fire Dean, he once again voiced his objection to that path. Again, it would give Dean a motive where he would implicate Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and possibly even Nixon himself. Incidentally, the telephone rang just then--and it was Attorney General Kleindienst. Judge Byrne, the trial judge in the Ellsberg case, had just gotten the news of the break-in at Lewis Fielding’s office. He was so angry that he’d sent the jury home and was likely to declare a mistrial. As if to add insult to injury, the phone rang again--and this time it was news that the New York Times had published a story about Pat Gray burning the evidence from Howard Hunt’s safe. Nixon was ashen-faced. The Wheels Come Off  The next week or so was not good to Richard Nixon. Again, he was confronted with the fact that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were too deep into the matter for him to keep them on. At Camp David that Saturday, April 28, Nixon walked into the living room at Aspen Lodge and was shocked to see his daughter Tricia sitting on the couch in front of the fire. She said she’d been up all night talking with Julie and her husband David about Watergate; the three had also talked with Pat Nixon. They were unanimous--Nixon had no choice but to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Tricia confessed to never being an admirer of either of them, but she said her decision was an objective one--and it reflected the views of the whole family. After she left, Secretary of State William Rogers came in. He told Nixon that he could no longer protect Haldeman and Ehrlichman--that they could not take a leave of absence. Resignation was the only option. Nixon asked Rogers to convey this to the pair, but Rogers refused. Nixon would have to do it himself. What happened next is probably one of the most bizarre, yet emotional moments of Nixon’s Presidency. Nixon would meet Sunday morning with both halves of the Berlin Wall separately. quote:Haldeman went over to Aspen Lodge. Nixon was waiting for him. They went out on the terrace to look at the tulips. Nixon told Haldeman, “I may not be alive much longer.” In a melodramatic voice, he went on: “You know, Bob, there’s something I’ve never told anybody before, not even you. Every night since I’ve been President, every single night before I’ve gone to bed, I’ve knelt down on my knees beside my bed and prayed to God for guidance and help in this job. “Last night before I went to bed, I knelt down and this time I prayed that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. I just couldn’t face going on.” Nixon said he knew it wasn’t fair, that he felt enormous guilt, that he knew the responsibility was his—but he still wanted Haldeman’s resignation. It all came to a head on April 30 at 9 PM. There, Nixon announced the resignations of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst--his involvement in the cover-up had become too much for Nixon to keep him on staff. To replace him, Nixon would choose this man.  Elliot Richardson was a former Defense Department official, and he’d been present at Utah Beach during D-Day--he had led a company of riflemen up and over during the initial assault. He tried to convince Nixon that the enemies he was imagining were just that: imaginary. quote:“Mr. President,” Richardson concluded, “I believe your real problem is that you have somehow been unable to realize that you have won—not only won, but been re-elected by a tremendous margin. You are the President of all the people of the United States. There is no ‘they’ out there—nobody trying to destroy you.” Clearly he’d never met Richard Nixon before. That April 30 speech featured a shaken, almost scared Nixon. Speaking from the Oval Office, he claimed that upon hearing of the break-in, he’d been “appalled” and “shocked”. He said he’d repeatedly asked those conducting the investigation whether there was any involvement by any members of his administration, only to be assured that no, there was not. That’s lie #1. Then, Nixon said, on March 21, “new information came to me.” At that point, he “personally assumed responsibility for the investigation”. Professing his determination to get to the bottom of Watergate, he pledged that the truth would come out, no matter who was involved. In that light, he had accepted the resignations of two of his closest advisors: Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvFsLXLVE-c It was what Nixon said next that perhaps precipitated the next major phase of the Watergate scandal. Ehrlichman had urged Nixon to say he was firing Dean, but Nixon was not inclined to provoke Dean further...which is perhaps why it surprised Dean so much when Nixon announced he was resigning too. Yeah. The Trump presidency is really a Nixon speedrun in more ways than you guys know. Here’s Ambrose again. quote:Nixon did not want to blame any of the men who had resigned for his troubles. He did explain that in 1972 he had been so busy running the country that he had allowed others to run his re-election campaign. “Alleged improper actions” took place within CREEP, Nixon said, and “the easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign.” But it was never Nixon’s style to take the easy way. “That would be a cowardly thing to do,” he said, and rejected it. Emphasis mine. This whole affair was Nixon professing to run towards responsibility, all the while doing his best to run away from it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 02:26
|
|
|
Growing Vulnerabilities Now with the Berlin Wall gone, with Dean in the wind, and so many of the conspirators tucking tail and running (or testifying), Nixon was finding himself increasingly on the defensive. On a daily basis, he was buffeted with new revelations from the Ervin Committee’s findings (once it was gaveled to order in mid-May) about his administration’s actions over the last four years. But to Nixon, the worst part was the double standard he felt the media was exercising. quote:Worst of all, the media, after eight years of ignoring the wiretapping and other illegal acts of the JFK and LBJ administrations, and after four years of virtual silence about those of the Nixon Administration, now began to report every unverified accusation. The press and the TV news programs became mirror images of the Nixon Administration. They printed or broadcast rumors and gross exaggerations of the nature and extent of the criminal acts of the Nixon White House. The Democrats, justifiably outraged by the actions of Richard Nixon and his friends, made unjustified comparisons of Nixon with Hitler, talked darkly about the coming of fascism to America, and denounced the Imperial Presidency they had done so much to create. Note: If this paragraph reads strangely to you, it’s because Stephen Ambrose tends to lean a bit right. The immediate reaction of many White House employees to the firing of Haldeman and Ehrlichman? “A sigh of relief,” according to NBC’s John Chancellor. The so-called “Berlin Wall” was by far the most unpopular part of the Nixon White House, among both fellow employees and the news media. There was a sense that the boil had been lanced, so to speak. Even George McGovern offered praise: “It is not an easy thing for a President to admit a mistake, but it is perhaps essential to the nation that he can.” But many Democrats and even a few Republicans were not satisfied. Unwilling to believe that the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman had fixed everything, they broached the idea that Nixon should resign too. Rep. John Moss (D-CA) said that House leaders should open impeachment hearings. House Majority Leader Thomas “Tip” O’Neill (D-MA) felt that was a bit premature, but he did say that he and other House Democrats were taking the suggestion seriously. Rep. Bella Abzug (D-NY) agreed with Moss--she demanded an immediate investigation to determine whether grounds for impeachment existed. There were Republicans who agreed. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) said that while impeachment was not something to be done “willy-nilly”, it should happen if it was found that Nixon had been dishonest about the matter in any way. Sen. Charles Percy (R-IL) introduced a resolution calling on Nixon to appoint a special prosecutor from outside the executive branch. It passed. In the House, 18 Republicans introduced a very similar resolution. Here’s a fun fact: one Republican to stand behind Nixon? Governor Ronald Reagan of California. He said that while the Watergate bugging was “illegal”, the word “criminal” was too harsh a word to use. The convicted conspirators should be considered criminals because, and I swear I’m not making this up, “they are not criminals at heart”. History intersects with itself in the weirdest--and worst--of ways. The news stories kept spilling out. On May 11, the New York Times reported that Nixon had placed illegal wiretaps on the telephones of reporters and NSC staff. That same day, Judge Byrne dismissed all the charges against Daniel Ellsberg. Three days later, on May 14, Sen. Stuart Symington (D-MO) revealed that during a closed hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Vernon Walters, deputy CIA director, had admitted that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean were involved in the June 1972 effort to use the CIA to cover up the White House’s involvement in the DNC burglary. A simultaneous leak from the Ervin Committee’s staff quoted former acting FBI director Pat Gray as saying that he’d warned the President that he was being “wounded” by men around him “using the FBI and CIA”. Three days after that, the Ervin Committee hearings were scheduled to start. Now, in this day and age, Washington committee hearings have to compete not just with basic cable, but with the offerings of streaming TV services as well. In 1972, neither of those things existed. There were three goddamn channels. This is what people watched. I remember hearing my parents tell stories about how people used to cluster around store windows that had TVs in them. The hearings were on TV in bars, in restaurants, anywhere there was television coverage. “We are beginning these hearings today in an atmosphere of utmost gravity,” Senator Ervin said, banging down his gavel. The cameras, focused on him, then swung to the back of the hearing room, where a young man in a paint-spattered t-shirt was standing. And that young man was The first few hearings were nothing earth-shaking. Ervin’s people questioned secretaries and minor staffers; none of them knew anything that was not already common knowledge...but Nixon continued to receive body blows from outside the hearing room. Elliot Richardson, in accordance with the special prosecutor resolution passed by the House and Senate, announced that he’d appointed this man.  Archibald Cox was a law professor at Harvard, and he’d been Solicitor General in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He even invited Ethel Kennedy to his swearing-in, a move that created a great deal of consternation in the White House. Newly-minted Chief of Staff Alexander Haig warned Nixon that Cox was a “Kennedy stooge” out to “get the President”. Because of course. Cox’s mandate had reason to give Nixon indigestion. quote:Richardson had approved a charter for Cox that amounted to a fishing license. The Special Prosecutor not only had full powers to investigate the break-in, but “all offenses arising out of the 1972 Presidential Election . . . and any other matters which he consents to have assigned to him by the Attorney General.” Cox had authority to conduct grand jury proceedings, to grant immunity, to initiate prosecutions, and to frame indictments. He had virtually unlimited funds. No time limit was put on his activities. He could be removed only if he committed “extraordinary improprieties.” Cox quickly gathered a staff of eighty investigators. Seven of the eight senior staff people had been in the Kennedy or Johnson Administration; more than half the lawyers were Harvard Law School graduates. As a generalization, it is fair to say that they may have assumed Nixon was guilty. From the White House perspective, the Special Prosecutor’s Office appeared a vanguard for Senator Edward Kennedy’s march to the White House. In many ways, the Cox appointment was indicative of Nixon’s fading power: right now, Elliot Richardson was still pending confirmation; he was only acting-Attorney General. Congress refused to confirm Richardson without the Cox appointment. Therefore, Nixon could not stop Cox from taking up his duties and proceeding with his investigation. In a way, it was a mini-Gilded Age resurgence for Congress, subjugated for so long after FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. Nixon’s White House underwent a rather dramatic face-lift in the post-Haldeman and Ehrlichman era, as Stephen Ambrose writes. I’m telling you all this so that when new players are introduced you don’t have to guess who they are. quote:Nixon made personnel changes designed to rebuild his Administration. He moved James Schlesinger from the CIA to the Pentagon, to replace Richardson as Secretary of Defense. He appointed Schlesinger’s deputy William Colby to become director of the CIA, and Clarence Kelley, the chief of the Kansas City police, as director of the FBI. At the urging of Republican congressmen, he persuaded Mel Laird and Bryce Harlow to join the White House staff as counselors to the President, while John Connally agreed to join that staff as an adviser without pay. Fred Buzhardt, a West Point graduate and general counsel of the Defense Department, who was a friend of Haig’s, joined Len Garment (acting legal counsel to the President). In effect, Buzhardt became Nixon’s defense lawyer for Watergate; this followed a Richardson announcement that Nixon could not rely on the Attorney General for legal advice but would have to hire his own lawyer. One other notable move: Nixon stopped letting Ron Ziegler deliver the daily press briefings. His deputy, Gerald Warren, would do it instead. No personnel moves Nixon made, however, made what was coming hurt less. Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, had gathered a staff of eighty investigators. Seven of the eight senior members of the team had been in the Kennedy or Johnson White Houses, and more than half the lawyers were Harvard grads. This may not sound like it matters much to you, but to Nixon, it meant that Cox’s team was nothing less than Sen. Ted Kennedy’s (D-MA) vanguard to march to the White House. The big question now was what John Dean would say. Originally, Nixon was going to try and head him off at the pass. “I’ll say I ordered the Plumbers,” Nixon said. “I had the Huston Plan. I told Haldeman and Ehrlichman to meet with the CIA.” Nixon felt that he could use national security for a cover over all of it. If you can figure out how, please let me know, because I really don’t. On May 22 Nixon issued his own preemptive statement. He stated, categorically: quote:1. I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate operation. All but one of these, the first one, are lies, we now know. Nixon definitely took active part in the cover-up, and he was most definitely complicit in the attempt to use the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation. And judging by the Pentagon Papers incident, he definitely encouraged subordinates to do illegal poo poo. Nixon stood upon a house of cards. quote:Nixon obviously counted on the loyalty of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Colson. The others were not highly enough placed, nor creditable enough, to refute him—except possibly Dean. And if Dean called Nixon a liar, it would be his word against the President’s. Unless the existence of the tapes became known. On May 29, Kissinger entered the fray, and in an attempt to make things better, made things worse. He had previously denied that he had authorized any wiretaps two weeks earlier--but now admitted that “his office” had supplied the names of NSC staffers to the FBI for the 1969 wiretaps. Kissinger said that he found wiretapping “distasteful” but defended it as necessary to safeguard national security. The battering and the slow leak of stories continued for the next month and a half. Woodward and Bernstein continued to publish stories, including one that implied that Cox was going to bring Nixon himself before a grand jury to answer questions. This was a rare mistake on their part--Cox had made no such decision, and he said so publicly. Had it not been for the constant drumbeat of stories, Nixon might have been able to make more hay of “Woodstein”’s mistake. How Dean And Butterfield Brought Down The Republic  The next great milestone in the Watergate hearings, as I’m sure you all know, came in late June of 1973. On June 25, John Dean sat down in front of the Ervin Committee and read a statement that was 245 pages long, in which he leveled the most sensational, earth-shattering charges against Richard Nixon the public had yet heard. With his wife and lawyers seated behind him, Dean read his prepared statement in a flat monotone for an entire day. Dean acknowledged his participation in the cover-up, but insisted that he had not known in advance about the Watergate break-in. He depicted himself during the Pentagon Papers incident as a “restraining influence” with regards to the plan proposed by Tom Huston to “blow the safe”, as Nixon had put it, and he claimed he had worked as a virtual double agent in the White House for months, meeting with Nixon while also sharing information with federal prosecutors. From there, Dean moved to Nixon. He charged that Nixon had known from the time of the break-in that there was a cover-up in play. He said that Nixon had permitted it to continue through early April of 1973, even after Dean warned him of the dangers involved. Nixon had discussed with him the possibility of executive pardons for the burglars as well as the payment of hush money. As we know, all of this is true...because the trusty White House taping system had caught all of it. According to Dean, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were the prime orchestrators of the cover-up, and he had decided to cooperate with federal prosecutors when he started to believe that they, along with Nixon, were scheming to set him up. Dean didn’t stop there. He fingered Mitchell as the man who’d authorized the hush money payments to E. Howard Hunt, and he also told the committee that Nixon had tried at one point to set Mitchell up as the fall guy for the whole thing as well. In fact, Dean went so far as to quote himself from the March 21 meeting with Nixon: “I began by telling the President that there was a cancer growing on the Presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the President himself would be killed by it. I also told him that it was important that this cancer be removed immediately because it was growing more deadly every day.” Dean made one stab at protecting Nixon. He claimed that he felt that Nixon “did not realize or appreciate at any time the implications of his involvement”. Rather, Dean said, it was an outgrowth of overly zealous staffers, excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrations, concern over leaks, and an insatiable appetite for political intelligence. Nixon was one of the few people who didn’t watch Dean’s testimony, but his staff did--they made summaries and gave them to Alexander Haig, who took them to the President. What he read made Nixon angry, to say the least. He accused Dean of making “self-serving statements” and “outright lies”. However, Nixon was astute enough to know one thing: it didn’t matter if all of Dean’s testimony was accurate--only some of it had to be. And with these accusations being leveled at Nixon not by his opponents, but by his own legal counsel, the American public was stunned and stupefied. Dean’s greatest asset was that he’d told the truth. Even Nixon, in his memoirs, admitted that: “Dean’s account of the crucial March 21 meeting was more accurate than my own had been.” Nixon, however, had the tapes...and he could use them selectively to refute Dean’s testimony--but even then he knew his weakness was that while he could use the tapes to show that he wasn’t as involved as Dean had said, the tapes would show that he’d been more involved than he’d claimed to be. At the time, however, Nixon was not prepared to admit anything of the sort. The next day, Gerald Warren told the press that Nixon stood behind the statements he made on May 22. You recall them, of course--he basically threw up his hands and said “I know nothing”. Even as Warren did this, Dean was in the hearing room batting back the charges like tennis lobs. The May 22 statement was “less than accurate”, Dean said. He characterized a series of presidential explanations as misleading, unfounded, or overly broad. When Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-GA) noted the depth and severity of the charges Dean was leveling against Nixon, he asked Dean, “What makes you think that your credibility is greater than that of the President, who denies what you have said?” “I have told it exactly the way I know it...I am telling you just as I know it,” Dean responded. Two days later, another lightning bolt hit the White House. Dean decided to release some documents to the committee. They included the White House “enemies list”, which had been prepared by Dean, Colson, and others over the last five years and was a reference for the use of retaliatory IRS audits, banning “enemies” from White House social functions, and removing enemy reporters from Air Force One. The fact that there were numerous print and television journalists on the list caused the media to give it top billing. Commentators were shocked. It became a badge of honor to be named among Nixon’s “enemies”. After all, the spirit of the whole thing was revealed in Dean’s August 1971 memo where he said that “we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies”. The use of these documents was enough to bolster Dean’s credibility and knock Nixon’s down a peg. Again, the topic of whether Nixon would testify in person before the committee was broached. Sen. Ervin replied that the “only reliable way” to test the credibility of a principal in a criminal case was to examine him under oath. Nixon responded that he would do no such thing; to do so would be “constitutionally inappropriate”. Perhaps someone should have told the 1990s GOP this when they dragged Bill Clinton before a grand jury. Here was the crux of the problem: Nixon and Dean had made their cases. Both had called each other liars. Neither, however, had produced any supporting evidence for their cases--Dean had not taken notes during his meetings with Nixon, and neither had Nixon, so there was apparently no documentary evidence. It was one man’s word against the other. Nixon had the tapes, though. He had exculpatory statements from Dean on them where he asserted that he could not provide the burglars clemency and it would be wrong to pay blackmail money, and I’m sure--as is every other biographer--that he was sorely tempted to use them. But doing so would have been an admission that the White House taping system existed. In effect, writes Stephen Ambrose, “he had constructed both scaffold and noose, and his ultimate defense”. quote:To release or not release the tapes? What if he released selected portions of them, and then lost control? But he was the President. The doctrine of executive privilege protected him. The tapes were no different from memos, letters, and other written documents. They were not subject to subpoena from either of the other two branches of government. But obviously if Nixon tried to use parts of the tapes and withheld the rest, there would be a clamor for full release, a clamor led by Special Prosecutor Cox, Judge Sirica, Senators Ervin and Baker, and the media. Nixon could well win the technical battle and keep his control of the tapes, but at great cost in public support. Plus, remember: Nixon was guilty. I mean, he was guilty as loving sin. And those tapes held the full extent of his guilt. He knew he hadn’t been joking when he told Dean to get a million dollars in hush money, he knew he’d ordered Dean to pay the hush money, and he knew he’d been an advocate of the cover-up as early as June 1972. For now, however, Nixon could control the battlefield. No one knew of the existence of the White House taping system outside of a select few individuals. For the first half of July, things were actually pretty good for Richard Nixon. When John Mitchell went before the Ervin Committee, he stood firmly behind his former boss. He flatly contradicted most of what Dean had said--claiming he had not approved the wiretapping of the DNC and he denied ever receiving information based on the transcripts of intercepted telephone calls. Accusing Dean of a “palpable, damnable lie,” he denied ever collecting hush money to pay the burglars as well. Nixon felt gratified. Dean’s testimony was one thing, but Mitchell was the linchpin of it all--and both he and Haldeman had stuck by their ex-boss. Nixon was no longer alone in opposing Dean’s testimony; he now had the support of the former United States Attorney General. Dean alone would not be enough to do more than bruise and batter him. And if it had stayed that way, I don’t know what would have happened. Perhaps the Ervin Committee would have run out of gas. Then July 16 happened. On that day in 1973, Alexander Butterfield went before the Ervin Committee.  I’ve mentioned Butterfield before. He’d been brought on as Haldeman’s chief administrative assistant when Nixon was first elected; and a few months earlier he’d left the White House for the big chair at the Federal Aviation Administration. Now, one thing you have to understand--the earth-shattering revelation? It didn’t happen in front of the full committee. A few days earlier, on July 13, Minority Counsel Donald Sanders had become curious about something John Dean had said during his testimony: he had said that he suspected during one of the conversations he’d had with the President that he and Nixon were being recorded. On the second day of Dean’s cross-examination, Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) had read a letter he’d received from Fred Buzhardt, one of the President’s lawyers. It contained a series of assertions about Dean’s involvement--Dean was the principal actor in the cover-up, Dean knew of and participated in the planning that led to the break-in, etc. It also contained a number of direct quotations from the President. Quotations that were suspiciously detailed, in fact. Majority Counsel Scott Armstrong asked Butterfield if Nixon’s memory for this kind of stuff was this good. Butterfield answered that he knew Nixon had a good memory, but these notes in particular seemed “too detailed”. Armstrong didn’t press the point, but Sanders was a different story. He’d been in the FBI for ten years before joining the House Internal Security Team as Minority Counsel, then he’d joined the minority staff of the Ervin Committee. His background and his political leanings suggested that he’d protect the President, but as he listened to Butterfield’s answers to Armstrong’s questions, “...I felt a growing certainty that the summaries had to have been made from a verbatim recording.” Why hadn’t Ervin’s staff asked Butterfield the question? Well, Dean had testified earlier that Nixon had taken him to a corner of a room and spoken to him in a quiet voice during one of the more incriminatory meetings. Why on Earth would he do that, Sanders asked Butterfield? “I was hoping you fellows wouldn’t ask me that,” Butterfield said. “I’m concerned about the effect my answer will have on national security and international affairs...but I suppose I have to assume that this is a formal, official interview in the same vein as if I were being questioned by the committee under oath.” “That’s right,” Sanders responded. “Well,” Butterfield said, “there’s a recording system in the White House.” He went on from there to explain how it worked in detail, but the details were lost. The staff scampered from the room to confer with their superiors, and immediately arrangements were made for Butterfield to appear before the full Ervin Committee on July 16. For once, there were no leaks--when Butterfield told his story to the nation, it hit with the force and impact of an atom bomb. Now the American public knew: there were tapes. And if there were tapes, we could find out, once and for all, who was telling the truth. The Battle Of The Tapes  That, by the way, is one of the actual tape recorders used in the White House taping system. When Nixon heard about Butterfield’s revelation, he was sick with pneumonia--laid up in a hospital bed...but even if he’d been perfectly healthy I think it would have knocked him flat anyway. He’d assumed the secret was safe, because he’d thought that any member of the staff who knew about the taping system would raise executive privilege before revealing its existence. Butterfield, needless to say, had not. Dean, on the other hand, welcomed Butterfield’s testimony, calling it “absolutely fantastic” and describing himself as “ecstatic”. Now, Dean knew, he had another weapon to use in his battle with Nixon--if the tape of that infamous March 21 meeting was ever to reach the public’s ears, there was no telling what might happen...the only thing that was certain was that it would be catastrophically bad for Nixon. Who, Americans wondered, was telling the truth? Dean immediately made it known that he wanted the tapes played, in full, in public. Nixon, obviously, wanted the tapes sealed in the White House where he’d make selective use of them. Public opinion ranged from depressed to outraged. AFL-CIO President George Meany, who had refused to support McGovern in 1972 (loving traitorous prick that he was), said the news was “so fantastic as to be almost beyond belief”. Former Interior Secretary Walter Hickel said “America will be sick at heart”. Speaker Carl Albert called it an “outrage, almost beyond belief”. Together with Alexander Haig, Nixon met to discuss the possible fallout of Butterfield’s revelation...and for the first time, Nixon broached the idea of destroying the tapes. Haig cautioned him against that, suggesting he talk to his lawyers first. As for the White House taping system, Nixon had it removed--not because it was wrong, but because it had gone from asset to albatross overnight. Most of Nixon’s staff didn’t take offense, to be honest. Speechwriter Ray Price didn’t believe there was anything wrong morally or politically with the taping system--the only real question, he said, was “what was done with the tapes”. There was precedent. After all, Franklin Roosevelt had made secret recordings. So had Kennedy and Johnson. Again, if it was just about the presence of the taping system, I don’t think Nixon would have been in nearly as much trouble. Fred Buzhardt, one of the associate White House counsels, put out a statement saying as much--that a lot of Presidents had secretly taped conversations. Nixon just got caught. In the hospital, Nixon met with his top staff: Haig, Ziegler, Len Garment, and Buzhardt. The lawyers wanted permission to review the tapes. “No. Never.” Nixon ended the discussion. OK, fine. What about destroying them? Newly-minted advisor and freshly-converted Republican John Connally had urged that particular course. “Please, Bob,” he’d told H.R. Haldeman, “use your influence to convince the President to burn the tapes...have Ziegler assemble the press corps in the Rose Garden, pile up all the tapes, set a match to them, and let them film the bonfire.” Nixon could say that the conversations on them dealt with national security affairs and matters highly embarrassing to politicians from both parties. Nixon viewed the tapes as his personal property, a position upheld by the precedent that any President’s papers are his personal property. If the tapes weren’t subpoenaed, they wouldn’t be evidence in a criminal case--and thus destroying them wouldn’t count as obstruction of justice. Yes, my eyes bugged out of my head too. The problem, as Garment identified, was that it would forever convince the public that Nixon was guilty. Even Vice President Agnew agreed. They couldn’t go this route. Why? quote:There were two basic factors at work. First, the tapes were Nixon’s best defense, just as Haldeman said, for the obvious reason that they contained so many exculpatory statements by Nixon, statements that he had made in his own transparent way whenever he remembered that the recorder was running. Nixon had already drawn on that asset in the preparation of the Buzhardt summary for the minority staff of the Ervin Committee. Second, as Haldeman put it, Nixon “just never dreamed it was possible that the tapes would ever be heard by anyone other than himself.” They were his property. They were protected by executive privilege. Everything Nixon had said in his July 7 letter to Ervin (“I shall not . . . permit access to Presidential papers”) applied equally to the tapes. On July 17 the first shot was fired. Sen. Ervin wrote Nixon that the Senate Select Committee had voted unanimously to request that Nixon provide them with all relevant documents and tapes under the White House’s control that related to Watergate and other activities. He requested a response “at your earliest convenience”, and signed off with an expression of regret at Nixon’s illness and his hopes for a speedy recovery. Anyone wanna take a stab at what Nixon’s response was? He took a week to write it, and basically it was a flat “no”, where he cited executive privilege as the reason. “Accordingly, the tapes, which have been under my sole personal control, will remain so. None has been transcribed or made public and none will be.” He stood, again, behind the statements he’d made on May 22. Thus commenced the next phase of Watergate: the part that historians colloquially refer to as “the battle of the tapes”. On that same July 23, 1973 where Nixon sent Ervin his response, a Gallup poll showed that his approval rating had plunged to 40% from January where it sat at 63%. The poll summary quoted a Chicago Tribune headline: “Facts Batter Sense of Trust”. In fact, it was Sam Ervin himself who captured the mood of many Americans when he said, “John Dean has said he told the President about the Watergate cover-up, and an unaltered tape of that conversation would offer the best contemporary evidence that Dean was telling the truth. I can think of no rational reason for the President not turning over the tapes unless the evidence found in them would be against him.” Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, was the next person to demand access to the tapes. Nixon’s lawyers rebuffed him. Next came a subpoena from the Ervin Committee for the tapes of Nixon’s meetings with John Dean. Nixon would, of course, refuse to comply. Judge John Sirica issued a subpoena to Nixon to produce documents and tapes for Earl Silbert’s grand jury. Nixon told Sirica it would be inconsistent with the public interest and the constitutional position of the Presidency to comply. Interesting note: the Ervin Committee’s subpoena marked the first time a congressional committee had subpoenaed a President and the first time since Aaron Burr’s treason trial in 1807 that a President had been served with a subpoena. The war escalated. It was clear that the Committee, Cox, and Sirica were going to press their demands, and Ervin said he wanted a declaratory judgment in court. Archibald Cox said on TV that while Nixon’s position was “presented in good faith”, it was still wrong because the precedents he was citing only applied to giving documents to Congress--not to a Presidential refusal to supply the courts and grand juries with information pertaining to possible charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. In fact, Cox said, one of the precedents Nixon had used didn’t apply--President Thomas Jefferson had complied with the 1807 subpoena and given the court the documents they’d requested. Whoops. The committee was a bit more flexible. They first proposed that Nixon allow a private audition of the tapes by Senators Ervin and Howard Baker (R-TN), along with Special Prosecutor Cox. They’d screen out anything not relevant to their investigations before making their findings public. Ervin explained his choice by saying that it was entirely possible that if they brought the case before the Supreme Court, that the Court would rule against the Committee and the tapes would be locked away forever. The following week, two of Nixon’s former aides rallied to his cause. John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman took the stand. Ehrlichman was very clear: he called Dean a liar and explained his own theory that the cover-up was intended to protect John Mitchell, not the President. On July 30, Haldeman replaced him and, just like Ehrlichman, lied brazenly to the Committee: “President Nixon had no knowledge of or involvement in either the Watergate affair or the subsequent efforts of a ‘cover-up’.” Haldeman said he knew this because he’d listened to the March 21 tape and he swore Dean had lied. Nixon had never indicated that he’d discussed clemency for the burglars nor had he given any indication that he knew about the hush money payments. Again: the loving BALLS on these guys. What pissed off the senators most was that Haldeman had heard the tapes. “The United States Senate can’t have those tapes, but you, a private citizen, can?” Ervin snarled at Haldeman. It continued like this. Everyone wanted to hear the tapes: Cox, Sirica, Ervin’s committee, the media, and the public wanted to know what on Earth was worth the lengths Nixon was going to in order to hide it. All throughout the month of August 1973, Nixon’s situation got worse and worse. Each counterattack only opened up another front in the war for the tapes. Each time it looked like his luck had turned, another revelation and another disaster squashed the good mood. And yet even through September, Nixon would keep the tapes...and his job. All the demands were met, repeatedly, with a polite but firm refusal. Through his spokesperson Gerald Warren, he declared that he and he alone would choose who had access to the tapes, based on his judgment of “who could best assist him in determining the facts of the Watergate matter without jeopardizing the confidentiality of the tapes.” His approval rating was still in freefall. By the start of August it had fallen to 31%--the lowest a President had scored in Gallup’s poll since Harry Truman’s last month in office and four points lower than even Lyndon Johnson’s low point in August 1968. We know, of course, that all the major events of the Nixon Presidency took place in orbit around the Watergate scandal--and it eroded Nixon’s ability to govern effectively. He could not stop Congress from cutting off the funding for the bombing in Cambodia, for example. To add insult to injury, the first week of August brought with it a new problem. “Impeachment Insurance” Let’s switch gears for a moment; we’re going to jump pretty far ahead in terms of the Watergate timeline, but we’re not going to talk about Watergate itself. During one of the many meetings Ehrlichman and Haldeman had had with Nixon in the last month, they had discussed the possibility of impeachment--only to dismiss it as absurd. Why? Well, it was this guy, really.  Before his headless body was destroyed on "Futurama", Vice President Spiro Agnew was as awful as his word from day 1 of the Nixon Presidency. With Nixon trying to act like he was above the fray, Agnew had savaged both Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972, and his incendiary style of campaigning had made him an enormous asset for the “New Nixon” who couldn’t afford to be seen as a gutter fighter. Agnew was referred to as Nixon’s “impeachment insurance” in the early phase of Watergate--after all, if Nixon was removed, no one wanted Agnew to be President, surely? In early 1973, newly-elected U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, George Beall, opened an investigation of corruption in Baltimore County. He was looking at public officials, architects, engineering firms, and paving contracts--he’d heard that contracts were being awarded by the political leadership to the people who could afford the biggest bribes. Pretty straightforward stuff. Anyway, there were initial rumors that Spiro Agnew might have been involved--but Beall dismissed them. Agnew hadn’t been a county executive since 1966 and any misdeeds done then would be past the statute of limitations. That changed, however, when the engineering firm of Lester Matz was served with a subpoena for documents--and in exchange for immunity, Matz said he’d been kicking money back to Agnew for years. Five percent of his contracts’ value, to be exact--first for county contracts in Towson, MD when Agnew had been county supervisor, then state contracts when he became governor. These fit a pattern. Democratic officials and investigative reporters had thought for years that Agnew was corrupt in addition to being an odious, rancid poo poo of a human being--but they’d never been able to prove the former. When Agnew first heard of the investigation in February 1973, he had then-Attorney General Richard Kleindienst contact Beall. Initially, the VP’s personal attorney was told that Agnew was not under investigation and prosecutors would do their best to protect his name. In what we’d call a classic case of “reversal of fortune”, Lester Matz’s attorney told Beall in June that he could show that not only was Agnew corrupt, but he’d even been accepting payments as Vice President. Yup. These payments were not barred by the statute of limitations, and Agnew could be prosecuted for them. Agnew met with both Nixon and his new Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig (this was post-Haldeman’s resignation) to proclaim his innocence at the end of July, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson had already started an investigation. On August 1, Beall told Agnew’s personal attorney that the Vice President was under investigation for tax fraud and corruption. Well, if you know anything about Spiro Agnew, you know that he fought these charges tooth-and nail. On August 8, he held a press conference where he called the stories “damned lies”. The day before, Nixon had met with Agnew and given him his complete support--but Haig had gone to visit Agnew after and told him that if the charges could be sustained, Agnew might want to “take action” prior to indictment. Do I really need to tell you what that means? The Watergate investigation had reached a fever pitch by this point, and both the President and the Vice President were getting top billing in the newspapers almost daily. Agnew in particular was facing increasing pressure to resign--but he fought nonetheless. He asked Speaker of the House Carl Albert (D-OK) for an investigation, claiming that a sitting Vice President could not be indicted, citing as precedent an 1826 investigation of Vice President John C. Calhoun (Calhoun had done much the same as Agnew; he’d taken improper payments from third parties while in office). His plea fell on deaf ears; Albert would not investigate a matter that was in the courts. Despite his protestations, Agnew was wearing down. He entered into negotiations for a plea bargain, claiming in his memoirs that he did so because he was trying to protect his family and he feared he would not get a fair trial. A whiny bitchbaby to the last. After meeting with Nixon on October 9, 1973 to inform him of his impending resignation, Agnew filed a formal letter of resignation with then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on October 10. He appeared before the federal court in Baltimore and pled nolo contendere to tax evasion for the year 1967. In exchange, Attorney General Richardson agreed not to prosecute further, and Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years’ unsupervised probation--an outcome that should not surprise you, because Agnew was a rich white guy and rich white guys don’t suffer consequences. Now back to Watergate.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 02:42
|
|
|
 what a hell of a writeup!And to think if we didn't have a turtle impersonator in control of the Senate, impeachment rumblings would be louder.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 04:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 11, 2024 10:36 |
|
|
Android Apocalypse posted:
i think mitch is one of the few things keeping trump in power at this point. sure fox keeps the base happy, but trumps polls are getting worse by the day even on fox.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 05:19
|
|